As librarians competent in scholarly communication issues, it is important to know a little bit about what publishing platforms are out there, both for commercial purposes and for Open Access.
Public Knowledge Project: Open Journal System [1]
"Open Journal Systems (OJS) is a journal management and publishing system that has been developed by the Public Knowledge Project through its federally funded efforts to expand and improve access to research."
Open Humanities Press [1]
OHP is a publishing collective that provides support and an electronic publishing platform for scholars which to start a new OA journal.
BioMed Central [1]
BMC is a commercial OA publisher, and covers a variety of sciences.
Society Publishers [2]
Access to articles published with society publishers is usually part of a membership fee or paid as a subscription.
University Presses [2]
University Presses publish scholarly or creative works, often for a small audience of specialists or a regional community of interest. The Association of American University Presses (http://www.aaupnet.org/) can provide examples and give you more information about these organizations.
Major commercial publishers
The major commercial publishers are Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Sage. According to "The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era", these five companies account for 50% of scholarly articles published.
Sources:
[1] Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook: Setting up an Open Access journal
[2] UM Libraries: Types of Journal Publishers
An open access mandate is a policy adopted by an institution or funder that requires faculty or research grant recipients to make their published journal articles open access. Faculty and grantees may do this in two ways: by publishing in an OA journal or by self-archiving in a disciplinary or an institutional repository.
Very often open access mandates come from government funding agencies or private foundations. These organizations require that their recipients make their findings open access as a contractual condition for receiving funding.
Famously, the NIH created a Public Access Policy in 2008, which states that all articles that result from NIH funded projects must be deposited in PubMed Central. The US government has since been busy with similar directives, such as the "Fair Access to Science and Technology Research" bill and a White House directive "Increasing Access to the Results of Federally Funded Research."
To find out which funders have an open access requirement, browse the "Research Funder Open Access Requirements" page at MIT or SHERPA/JULIET.
When considering licensing issues pertaining to Open Access publishing, it is important to understand the literal rainbow of OA publishing options:
GREEN. Green OA refers to self-hosting of copies by a person, lab, or university. These can be archived and made available as pre-prints, post-prints, or in the final, formatted version published by the journal. An institutional repository is considered green.
GOLD. Gold OA refers to journals typically associated as open access, and they usually, but not always, charge a hefty fee to authors. Some big name journals, such as Nature and Cell have begun experimenting with gold OA as well.
BLUE. Blue journals are not Open Access, but will allow authors to archive post-prints or the publisher's version PDF in an institutional repository.
YELLOW. Yellow journals are also not considered Open Access, but they will allow authors to archive a pre-print.
WHITE. White journals do not support self-archiving of any kind.
True Open Access journals allow the author to retain their copyrights. Usually, articles are covered by a Creative Commons license to allow others to freely access, copy and use research provided the author is correctly attributed. Since the author retains the copyright, he or she would be able to use the final published version of the article in any way they wished, including adding the full text to an institutional repository.
Hybrid Open Access journals give the author the option of publishing their article as open access or publishing via the traditional method. The author (or their institution) will usually have to pay an Article Processing Charge (APC) to make their article open access. In doing so, however, the author retains copyright and the article is published under a Creative Commons license. The author may also choose not to publish their article as open access and instead sign a copyright transfer agreement, meaning they lose the copyright in all versions of their article. Some publishers such as Elsevier and Springer offer hybrid OA journals.
Source:
University of Reading. Open Access: Copyright and Licensing.
Open Access by The Knowledge Box is the institutional repository for Georgia College & State University. It is a bepress product called Digital Commons. Digital Commons is one of the more popular proprietary software services for institutional repositories, and is used by several colleges and universities in Georgia: Kennesaw, Georgia Southern, and GSU to name a few.
The Knowledge Box currently hosts theses from various departments, clinical research projects from the School of Nursing, The Corinthian, items from Special Collections, and back issues of The Colonnade. We are currently attempting to expand our collection, to include student research outside of theses as well as faculty publications.
An important distinction to make is that very few things are published in The Knowledge Box. Most things are deposited, and some were actually published elsewhere.
When speaking with faculty and students about The Knowledge Box, keep a few things in mind:
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